Childhood Memory of Adult History. Holocaust Trauma and Migration in Z. Oryszyn’s novel «Saving Atlantis»

Zyta Oryszyn’s (b. 1940) novel «Saving Atlantis» (2012), like almost all of her work, is born of a sense of guilt – a desire to «cover with words» the pain caused by childhood memories of the trauma of participation (unwitting complicity in the expulsion of Germans from the Regainde Lands), the trauma of witnessing (the Holocaust) and the trauma of inheritance (family memory of forced migration). Children’s consciousness, adapting to adult reality, accommodates the experience of power and powerlessness, of invader, victim and witness. From this position, the novel explores – in all its fragmentation – the autobiographical memory of the former German space functioning in the paradigm of violence, a space traumatising and generating a sense of unrootedness. The dramatic stories of several families, told from different perspectives, intersect and intertwine, forming a sorrowful labyrinth of fear, resentment, orphanhood, humiliation, and insurmountable alienness.